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Some of you signed up for the Save Betty project at the zone, that required you to commit to 21 days of vegetarianism. I wanted to see how many of you can keep it up and how many of you will give me feedback. Unfortunately, only one person seems to have kept their end of the bargain.

But, as I have always said, if I can make a difference in only one person's life, then my job here is done. Thank you Osama for your feedback.

Feedback from Osama Elamin

- Successfuly completed the committement on 21 days cycle by Aril 3, as mentioned earlier in total its 36 days of Non Stop, started since Feb 27 during ISB & The Zone (for 15 days) and continued (for another 21 days) after The Zone as of Mar 14 up to Apr 3.

I took this commitement for the following reasons :
- To maintain the self descipline to continue being in The Zone, getting out of the comfort Zone to develop the habit of check and balance remaining in The Zone.
- During ISB & The Zone for 15 days it was not optional, that's why I continued for more 21 days optionaly for the purpose of self descipline.
- Taking the Vegetarianism committement was mainly for descipline and remaining in The Zone to develop the consistency & has nothing to do with unti violence, due to my religious believe.

The commitment of I am starts with not just where you are right now but with all the possibilities of where you should have been, you could have been. It means I am here but heck…I should be somewhere else. I am still not there yet. Wherever there is!

Where am I now? If you had already achieved everything you want to, would you be here? No.

When you recognize I am here and I can be better, you need to identify the goals of what you want. The target is to get into that precise state of mind.

We all have different things in our heads but don’t let that distract you from your goal.

Watch this guy walk the tightrope across a gorge high up in the mountains with no safety net and no special equipment. If he loses focuses even for a second, its a vertical drop straight down the gorge.

The reason you got an invitation to the Zone is because of your relationship with me.

When you are sick, you are alone, when you die, you are alone. You wake up alone, you go to bed alone. Life is a very personal journey. You in your journey want to do something about being better. You need to understand why you were born, why and how you can make a difference. And therein lies the reason you are here.

It is my personal commitment to each and every one of you. I’ve gone through this journey. I do this because I wish there was something like this for the first ten years of my life after I left college. If I had a chance to relive it, I would start earlier on working on my goals. No one woke me up for a good ten years at least and even then it was circumstances that woke me up.

All the things you consider urgent are rarely important and the important things are rarely urgent. The zone will challenge you, in one way or another.

Life is short and temporary. You need to recognize what is important. It’s very easy to slide back...and we continue to slide back.

Success is purely individual. It cannot be shared. You have to recognise that this journey you are on is all about you.

Conquering fear

Embrace your fear: Participants get ready to walk on fire at Zone 2013.

You all wrote down your reasons for wanting to come to the zone. Hopefully these reasons are life changing reasons. In the words of Steve Jobs – it is death that makes life meaningful.

Fear has to be part and parcel of the process for the subconscious to work. The physiological effect to the body comes from the subconscious. Your palms sweat, your mouth goes dry…these are the physiological effects you see. None of us know when a chapter ends in our life. That’s why we need to embrace that fear. We have to let our fears go. Fear can paralyse you or help you take that leap forward.

The earmark of a true champion is focus. Your mind is a very powerful instrument but it’s also a wild stallion that needs to be controlled. Whatever your target is, you must become one with it.What is the single most important thing to you? For someone you love, what will you not do?

As long as you are willing to pay the price and keep on adapting, adjusting and accommodating, you can do it.

Difference between planning and preparing

Plan, Project, Practice, Persevere, Persist.

Life is the best teacher of all. Invariably life knows how to get to you when everything else fails. Ultimately something, somewhere always hits us right in between the eyes. It is the part and parcel of what we go through. But in some of our cases, it totally devastates us. You have to find a balance between your interaction with your target and knowing what is going on around you. You are going to have to understand that life has its own way of teaching us lessons. There are all kinds of ways that pain hits you.

The urgent things in life will not take you to success, it’s the important things that do.

Before the Zone officially begins, I invited graduates of the previous Zone to come spend an evening with and talk to me about their experiences since the last Zone, the learnings they applied since then and the new issues they would like to discuss.

You can read the live tweets from the session on my Twitter page - www.twitter.com/VjayEswaran. Follow the official hashtag #Zone.

Here are some highlights from last night.

The zone is inside of you. There are some people who live above the barrier all the time. They don’t know how else to live. You see them, you feel them and you get energized. Its something you must learn to have. Its not magic. It takes effort. It takes discipline, it takes attitude. You have to rework yourself. It’s a daily process.

The zone is a mental journey. What you do to get to the zone is more important than the Zone itself. It is the preparation that is most critical. You have to work incredibly hard at it and be very smart about.

So what is working hard?

What is hard for you may not be hard for someone else. So when you tell someone to work hard, you have to define the term 'hard'. I define hard as doing something you don’t like to do. And that is usually a long list. As you start to do it and do it again and again, you get better at it and you learn to love it. But it’s a process.

Ask any champion in the sports field and they'll you its the mental attribute that is far more important than the physical attribute.

What is working smart?

The preparation, the planning, the thinking, the forethought. Working smart requires you to think first. Plan, Prepare, Project. Any endeavour requires this.

If you do the planning and preparation before the projection, you will have feasible projections and even then you will reject 20 of them. That’s working smart. Only then you can apply working hard. If you spend that little more time preparing, planning, projecting, you will be that much more effective.

Remember always, before you can develop, design and direct, you have to plan, prepare and project.

Here are some important lessons you should remember.

In order to be spontaneous you have to do a tremendous amount of planning. You cannot be spontaneous without all the effort behind it.

There is only one fear you should have. That you have only today, and only today counts. And you have to maximize today.

What is your drive? What makes you get up in the morning? You have to identify that. Otherwise life is not worth it.

Always stay hungry. It doesn’t matter how big a cheque you receive. Never rest on your laurels. Otherwise, your laurels will soon become wreaths.

Earning money is hard work. But keeping it is an art form. It can be a serious problem.

Hard work is a mental game. We are all good at some things and weak at some things. The things we are good at, we like to to do more of. Practising the Sphere of Silence is incredibly difficult. It's something that constantly challenges you. I’ve never met anyone who considers it a walk in the park. Every single person you may know who has achieved greatness in some form or another, whether they call it private time or ‘time to myself’, they all practice silence or a period of solitude. Practising the Sphere of Silence will challenge you, it will stretch you, it will break you but the one thing it will help you conquer, is your mind.

You have to come here with the mind of a child. De-program yourself to think about failure.

When I initially conceptualised the Zone, it was primarily meant for the network leaders. But after careful consideration and requests from Directors of the Company, I decided to open up a few places for corporate participants. In the second year, this number went up by a few more. In its third year now, we are going to have more than 20 corporate participants at the Zone 2013.

As part of the nomination process, each corporate nominee was asked to write in to me with their reason for wanting to be a part of the Zone this year. I must admit that I was very impressed by some of the submissions. One in particular left a strong impression on me, especially because it came from someone who is known to be a quiet, number cruncher.

Agatha Yap, the Finance Manager of The V wrote from her heart and with her permission, I would like to share it here with all of you.

Dear Dato Sri,

1) Like M. Gandhi said, “to be the change that you want to see in the world.” Is the primarily reason that I decided to enrol to the Zone. To see the changes in the Company, I need to change.

2) I believe that if I do the best, things will change but this is not necessary the case. The reason could be, I haven’t done enough or I haven’t done it differently. Attending to the Zone would be an opportunity for me to learn the skillset and mind set to do things differently.

3) You had mentioned that focus, is the primarily force to drive the change. To lead a change isn’t easy and I always wonder how could our founder of the company achieved that despite many challenges happen in the past. Till today, I still cant figure out how Dato Sri that you could maintain a positive altitude during the 2007 incident. The challenges that you been through is far greater than mine and when I read your TOD after the V Jakarta in 2007, and I believe that the only thing that drive the company till today is your thought process and also the team who influenced by you.

“ Prison is not a building, it is your mind. Many people live and leave their lives in prison, without ever being in one.”

4) I would like to learn this from you and I know that to be in your Zone isn’t easy, but I want to give it a try.

Thank you for given me the opportunity to write to you personally, the process has taught me a lot.